John Dean revives Jew Adorno's corpse

[Abzug Hoffman]

I caught the end of John Dean on The Daily Show, he was plugging his new book, where he presents startling evidence that Bush and his crowd are a bunch of Nazis. It's only "The Authoritarian Personality" dusted off and presented as news. Necohens on the right, commie jews on the left, where would we be without our jewish helpers?

The Jews need a Miracle, so apparently Jew Goldwater is to be revived, too. Hey, he would have bombed the hell out of Vietnam and won!! So, let's quit monkeying around in the Middle East, and get out the nukes. Israel will tell us where to point them.


From a blog called The Last Hurrah:
July 12, 2006
Authoritarian Personality Theory and Studies.
I am a mite late to this issue, in some respects because I first posted this at an extended diary at DKoss, and because I wanted to flip through a few old books before responding. But what moves me is the claim by John Dean -- in his new book as reported on Obermann. (note -- He and I were both baptized in the same water on the same Palm Sunday at First Methodist Church in Akron Ohio in 1939 -- and his mom and my mom used the same gynecologist -- one Dr. Conger. I think we also had the same baby doctor.) He went to Wooster College and roomed with the son of Barry Goldwater, I went to Antioch, and some of my best friends got killed one way or another in the Civil Rights movement. But when LBJ had his 1966 Civil Rights Conference, more than half of the head table were Antiochians. Ohio is a really odd place. His dad was management at Firestone, my dad was an accountant at Goodyear till he moved on to the War Department and Army Audit during WW II. John Dean apparently is publishing a book about Authoritarian Personality Theory -- and how it relates to comprehending what a conservative really is about, and suggesting that somehow all the research on this has been "secret" for the last 50 years or so. Now I am glad that Dean is calling attention to the theory, but it is hardly secret. I have a whole shelf full of books on it, I have a file cabinet full of monographs. Should I ask the CIA if the stuff is classified even though I read it back in the 60's and all? What I called attention to in my DKos post in a late piece in a diary was history. After perhaps 300 posts someone finally mentioned T.W. Adorno as the actual author of the critical book -- "The Authoritarian Personality" first published by the American Jewish Committee in 1950, and then reprinted by Norton in 1969. It is a book in need of an edit for clarity, but it is a profoundly important book. (Most Sociologists do not do clarity -- it took me ages to work off the rough edges of that kind of training.) John Dean is making the point that since the late 1940's, Sociologists, and Social Psychologists have been about measuring something about affinity to authoritarianism or some version of fascism. And as the blog finally recognized, there is something called the f-scale, that has been quite well validated. What Dean is contending -- which should interest us -- is how closely connected many contemporary right wing and Republican thrusts are to theory of Authoritarianism, and indeed the substance of fascism. My own contribution is Intellectual History. Adorno and his friends and associates were mostly from Vienna in the early 1920's. Late 20's they moved to Frankfurt, which gave them the namesake, "The Frankfurt School." Early 1933, they moved on to Paris cause they were "wanted types" -- and between 1934 and about 37 they managed movements and appointments to the US. Many of them ended up in a WPA project paid at 30 dollars a week translating the German materials they had produced before they left Germany that was at Columbia, -- and for which the US Government was profoundly indebeted -- Others would end up in OSS jobs, and yet others in Army Intelligence. And yes, some got actual academic rank. But it is important to comprehend how the "Frankfurt" ideas seeded things. In Germany they were simply a theory -- Sociology was a theory -- but moved first to France and then to the US, the demand was for moving the theory to an empirical science, and the real accomplishment of the Frankfurt group was that they did this. They found common cause with the measurement folk, and adopted -- thus something like the f-scale. But what I really focus on is the political history. The Frankfurt group was very useful to the OSS and Military Intelligence during and soon after the war -- but then a group with an initial Marxist origin became a problem. Part of the problem was actually the fact that Edward R. Murrow working with IIE and the Emergency Committee had made possible their excape from Fascism -- and in the early 50's it was clear that Joe McCarthy was on a path to do in Murrow, and anything he had been associated with, and that would have included the Frankfurt crowd. Of interest, the CIA did move them back to Germany when they were most exposed in the US. It was clearly in US interests to have a non Marxist-Leninist but still Marxist intellectual center in Germany. CIA bought and paid for, Herbert Marcuse sent his best student, Angelia Davis, off to study with his good German friends. Essentially the Left owns a good deal of this narrative, and we should not really allow John Dean to somehow glory in rediscovery of a little sliver of it. Why should we have to rediscover the founders of what was really dominant social theory in the 50's and 60's? One cannot do the sociology, the social psychology, the anthropology, and much else of that period with out reference to the work of [JEW]Adorno and all his associates.

[ThemeOfSadness]

The whole theory is blatantly absurd and rest on a fallacy that a persons social and political behavior are analogous. My biggest problem with all hip Jewish theories is that
first they way out live their time. Adorno is still name dropped and treated as credible when it cannot keep up with many of the newer social theories, networks, games, etc.
Second, Jewish cultural capital allows the mass proliferation of false ideas before they can be properly verified, tested, or disproven. Think about the intense social scrutiny that an idea such as natural selection had to endure. Only through repeated challenge and testing could evolutionary theory emerge as fully acceptable. Yet, Jews and their limitless theories emerge almost instantly and always purport to be revolutionary (think Thomas Kuhns "Paradigm Shift"). It as if the truth is always shifting, as to keep scientific and philosophical progress off track.